Reel Faith: How the Drive-in Movie Theater Helped Create the Megachurch - the Atlantic
The Crystal Cathedral rises like a spaceship out of an impossibly green lawn in Garden Grove, Orange County, California. The structure is neither crystal nor, technically, a cathedral, but it’s acted as an archetype for a 20th century phenomenon: the Christian megachurch. From the church’s soaring, sunlit pulpit, the charismatic preacher Reverend Robert Schuller spoke to a sea of worshippers — not just to congregants in the cavernous room itself, his image amplified by a JumboTron, but also, eventually, to a much wider audience via the church’s iconic Hour of Power reality show. If Christianity exists to be spread, the Cathedral has existed to do that spreading. It’s been at once a place of worship and a TV studio.
The Crystal Cathedral has been in the news most recently for its financial troubles — culminating in bankruptcy, a controversial shift in the the church’s leadership structure, and, finally, the sale of the Cathedral itself to a neighboring (Catholic) diocese. Today, the church ministry announced that the congregation will be moving its services a smaller building, a currently Catholic church, a mile down the road from the Cathedral’s compound. In that, the Cathedral also seems symbolic of its times.
But if a church is a kind of technology — of media, of communication, of community — then it’s fitting that even a megachurch would have a humble startup story. And the origins of the Crystal Cathedral, for all its shine and swagger, are more garage than skyscraper.
In 1955, the Reformed Church in America gave a grant of $500 to Reverend Schuller and his wife Arvella. The young couple were to start a ministry in California; for that, they needed to find a venue that would host their notional congregation. While making the trip from Illinois, driving on Route 66, the reverend took to a napkin and listed 10 sites that could host his budding ministry. Researching the matter further, however, Schuller discovered that the first nine of those options were already in use for other purposes. So he set his sights on the tenth: the Orange Drive-In Theatre.